Some days we don't seem to be able to perform an action as simple as slicing a melon.
You are not focused in the process and suddenly you cut yourself.
You know that grim sensation: You are cutting said melon in slices, a relatively simple task, with a well-sharpenned knife. And, ha! dear Newton's law of motion comes to play. The knife slips and the continuous motion finds your finger and makes it through the skin which will sacrifice itself to act as the force (ha! up yours mündliche Prüfung der Technikwissenschaft, I have found a mean to those sleepless nights) with that slicing pain on your nervous endings. We know our fingers are the most important terminations for the sense of touch. Murphy's law in physical law.
It's not a deep cut, but it's messy and it's always made in an inopportune spot. And to activate the maruja in you it makes a bloddy mess of your counter, your melon and if you are lucky enough, your sleeve.
This cut of ours leaves a transversal opening that takes ages to heal. Why? Because every single time we'll touch something, the cut will reopen. Would the solution be not to use your hands for a while?
And so, once upon a time, cutting a melon, I thought it was a nice analogy to describe certain episodes in my life. The ever opening/healing cut.
Everything started on a distant here and then long time ago. Even before we started using those gadgets we carry everywhere that make us hooked and available, but paradoxically, less humanely available. And it continued opening and closing.
I have always lived in a here and a there. I have many places I call home. I have many whanaus and I am different persons, in different languages, with different habbits depending where I live. And I love them all.
Luckily I don't have a strong relationship to my mobile phone, or else I'd be living many nows and thens simultaneously, never letting go, bleeding through the cut. For the ones who know how it feels, it is soul enriching, and also excruciatingly heartbreaking at times. You learn to love people quickly and you are always ready to have to say goodbye... or hello again.
I think I have mentioned somewhere in some old entry about a sign post I once saw in Auckland, on one of my returns, returning to a hello again that got me involved in the plot of a bizarre storyboard hardly anyone has ever experienced and I would never wish anyone to do. Great material for a book.
The sign was an ad for those glasses that darken depending on the sunlight.
It read so: progressive grey. I can't say how strong it stroke me and how appropriate and coincidental those two words hit my /grey/ matter. It is an insider's pun. Such a smart little ad, telling my then-life with its words.
I chose to change the grey to pink: It was a progressive pink I was aiming to force me to believe, walking under a thick lay of grey.
I don't know if "progressive pink" would do as good a title for a book. Or "the ever opening sliced finger" or simply "loved over".
Not able to decide I think every chapter in my many theres deserves a title: Auckland is "progressive pink", Sydney is "loved over", Germany "die fantastischen drei und half", "Die Hühnerhaufen", "Gromenauer".
Back in Europe I have gone back to touch base in my headquarters in Amsterdam. Why did I set base there? What would I call that chapter? "El hijo tonto"?, "the coot of the graacht"?
Amazing how certain stimuli, a cut finger, a pair of progressive grey glasses, a coot, this ever changing multilingual, multicultural life that looks for a monohome... trigger a compulsive impulse to write with no end. Write about unhealed cuts like lessons unlearned, progressive glasses that tie you to your fantasy-living in a lie, coots that swim away on the graacht when you throw them the whole loaf.
I am home. I am change. Everywhere.
18 de setembre 2016
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